Resistance & reimagination

I thought when I stepped back from my charity leadership role in perinatal mental health a couple of years ago, I'd also stepped down from my soapbox. Turns out I haven't.

I carry with me a deep sensitivity to inequity. I've been exploring recently the way my inner landscape mirrors some of the key aspects of ADHD; a high sensitivity to rejection, an endless desire to create, hyperfocus and a profound awareness of injustice. Right now I'm not called to seek a diagnosis but it does help me to make sense of my own patterns.

It sounds ridiculous but I assumed others were also ignited in the same fierce way by disparities in support. I can't hear the statement that only 6% of private healthcare investment goes into women's health (World Economic Forum) without feeling called to take some kind of action. It's visceral.

I spend hours listening to women. I hear their deepest fears and insecurities and the ways they are shoehorned into rigid systems that weren't deisgned by or for them. 

I sit alongside women who are caring for teenagers while also tending to the needs of vulnerable aging parents. They're precariously juggling demanding roles while managing hospital appointments, meds prescriptions, power of attorney and capacity issues in one breath then helping to navigate their adult children's life decisions, nursing fears of spiralling university debts and equipping their offspring for a world they themselves barely recognise. It's a stark reminder of the unacknowledged collision between caring and careers, which mainly falls on women's shoulders.

In those coaching moments I'm reminded that at times we all need to take a breath. We've been bracing ourselves against the relentlessness of life's demands for so long that we've forgotten to exhale. The pace of our thinking is so accelerated there's no wonder we live in a state of perpetual hypervigilance.

I'm guilty too. I get so fired up by systems and power dynamics that I forget to return to my own centre and embrace my autonomy. I get so caught up by how things are that I lose touch with our human capacity to reimagine. I fall back to the realisation that fighting against things takes an enormous amount of energy and often serves to perpetuate the same reality. What we resist persists. And the times in my life when I've felt fully in flow and aligned are when I've gone in a new direction. Not by waiting for permission, but by simply creating what I wish had already existed. 

While the sensitivity to injustice might seem problematic, I now realise it's been incredible fuel for me. My perpetual desire to not be contained by systems and ways of being is the impetus that allows me to create. Injustice is my muse. And now it's about harnessing that in maturer ways, that no longer burn me out and deplete me, but keep me centred and fulfilled.